Eric Berridge is a 23-year Salesforce ecosystem veteran and CEO of Coastal, a premier Salesforce consultancy he joined in 2020 and took the helm of in September 2023. He previously co-founded Bluewolf in 2000 - one of the first Salesforce-focused consulting firms - and built it to a major acquisition by IBM in 2016. A TED speaker, two-time author, and MFA-holder in creative writing who never studied computer science, Berridge argues that the humanities are tech's most underrated competitive advantage. Under his leadership, Coastal was acquired by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for $700 million in January 2026, the largest professional services acquisition in Salesforce ecosystem history.
Alex Shan is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Judgment Labs, a San Francisco startup building the continuous-improvement stack for AI agents. A former Stanford NLP researcher under Chris Manning who pioneered autonomous networking agents at Juniper Networks, Shan started Judgment with two childhood best friends to give teams tools that understand what their agents are actually doing - not just their inputs and outputs. In May 2026 the company closed $32 million in combined seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Alex De Simone is the CEO and co-founder of Avochato, a business messaging platform that lets sales, support, and operations teams talk to customers over text. He launched it the summer after his first year at Stanford GSB, grew it to seven-figure revenue in under a year, and raised a $5M Series A led by Amity Ventures in 2018. Before Avochato he co-founded Jobr, a Tinder-style job-search app acquired by Monster.com. A self-taught coder with a mechanical engineering background, he turned a side project into a product used by 1,000+ businesses for millions of two-way conversations.
Amanda Greenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Balloon, a SaaS platform that eliminates groupthink and cognitive bias from team collaboration through anonymous idea submission and merit-based voting. A former public health researcher who developed behavior-change campaigns for the CDC, EPA, and DOE, Greenberg pivoted to tech entrepreneurship after observing how social dynamics suppress good decision-making in rooms full of smart people. She co-founded Balloon in 2015 with her husband and CTO Noah Bornstein, bootstrapped to a Fortune 50 client within 11 months, raised $2.6M in seed funding from investors including Jason Calacanis and Matt Mullenweg, and was named to Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 100 list in 2022. Balloon's advisory board includes Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, and Daniel Pink.
Amanda Luke is the CEO of Bonafide Provisions, the family-founded California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth. A UC Berkeley and Columbia-trained marketer, she spent years building health-and-wellness brands at Safeway and Luvo before joining the small Carlsbad broth company in 2018, rising from VP of Marketing to CEO within roughly a year. Under her leadership the women-led brand pushed beyond frozen broth into keto cups, cooking broths, and shelf-stable pantry products, positioning Bonafide as one of the most recognizable clean-label bone broth names in the United States.
Alexander Casdin is the Chief Executive Officer of Epirium Bio, a San Diego biotechnology company developing small-molecule therapies to improve muscle function. A healthcare executive and institutional investor with more than 25 years in the industry, he stepped up from CFO and COO to CEO on January 1, 2025, the same month Epirium's lead drug MF-300 - a first-in-class oral 15-PGDH inhibitor for sarcopenia - cleared the FDA to begin human trials. Before Epirium he founded and ran Reneo Capital Management, was CFO of Sophiris Bio, and ran VP of Finance at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, and he sits on the board of Erasca as audit committee chair.
Alexander Kates is the cofounder and CEO of Vetcove, the free ordering platform that lets veterinary practices, zoos, aquariums and animal welfare groups shop every supplier at once - think Kayak, but for the stuff that keeps animals healthy. He built it with his brother Mitch after watching the inventory manager at their father's equine veterinary practice juggle 30-40 vendor tabs by hand. Before veterinary supply chains, Kates was a digital strategist who advised Fortune 500 companies, taught executives on four continents, and co-wrote a bestselling marketing textbook. Vetcove now employs hundreds and serves a large slice of US veterinary hospitals.
Alexandra Mysoor is the co-founder and CEO of Alix, an AI-powered estate settlement platform built to guide families through the 600-900 hours of paperwork that follow a death. After 20 years launching and scaling consumer brands and running her own global manufacturing and investment firm, Mysoor Industries, she started Alix in 2022 when settling a best friend's mother's estate consumed 900 hours of her life. Alix raised a $20M Series A in July 2025 from Acrew Capital, Charles Schwab and Edward Jones Ventures. She also sits on the board of Security National Financial Corporation.
Alfredo Andere is the co-founder and CEO of LatchBio, a San Francisco company building cloud and machine-learning infrastructure for biology. Born in Mexico City and raised in Guadalajara, he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, worked at Google on the TensorFlow-NumPy framework and as a data engineer at Facebook, then dropped out of Berkeley in early 2021 with two college friends to start LatchBio. The trio conducted roughly 300 customer interviews before writing code, raised an oversubscribed $5M seed led by Lux Capital, and have since scaled the company through a $28M Series A and a 2026 Series B, bringing total funding to $163M. Andere is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Ali Akhtar is the co-founder and CEO of Letter AI, a Chicago-based, AI-native revenue enablement platform that helps B2B sales teams build training, content, coaching, and live deal guidance with generative AI. A University of Chicago and Michigan Ross graduate, he spent roughly a decade leading machine learning and product teams at Samsara, project44, and McKinsey before launching Letter AI through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch. By early 2026 the company had raised more than $52 million, including a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, and counted Lenovo, Adobe, Novo Nordisk, Plaid, and SolarWinds among its customers.
Ali Hussain is the CEO and co-founder of Tabs, a New York based startup building AI agents that automate the messy contract-to-cash side of B2B finance: billing, collections, and revenue recognition. He founded the company in 2023 after watching accounts receivable break at scale as COO of Latch (later DOOR), and earlier worked at Boston Consulting Group, Google, and the U.S. Congress. In September 2025 Tabs raised a $55M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to launch its first Billing and Collections agents, bringing total funding to roughly $92M.
Alice Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics (now Verge Labs), a San Francisco biotech she started in 2015 after walking away from an MD/PhD program at UCLA. She built a company that pairs machine learning with one of the largest collections of human brain tissue to find drug targets for diseases like ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. A Princeton molecular biology graduate, Soros Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Zhang turned her inexperience into what she calls a 'superpower,' raising more than $130 million and partnering with Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca before pivoting the company toward selling its data and insights to pharma in 2025.
Alison Richards is the CEO of Surest, a UnitedHealthcare company (formerly Bind) that builds a health plan with no deductibles and upfront prices people can see before they book care. A UnitedHealthcare veteran since 2012, she has turned the company's most contrarian benefits idea - let members shop for care the way they shop for everything else - into its fastest-growing employer plan.
Alla Zamarayeva is the co-founder and CEO of CellFE, a Bay Area biotech building a non-viral, microfluidics-based platform for engineering human cells. A UC Berkeley engineering PhD and former Goldwater Scholar, she spun a piece of academic research she stumbled onto during her doctorate into a company aiming to make cell therapies cheaper, gentler, and eventually available at the point of care. In 2023 she led CellFE to a $22 million Series A backed by M Ventures, and she is steering the company toward redefining how gene-edited cell therapies are manufactured.
Allison Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Revive, a New York fashion-tech company that helps brands recover value from returned and unsellable inventory through AI-driven inspection, refurbishment, and resale. A Korean immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at 13 and studied psychology at UC Berkeley, she first built Hemster, a SaaS tailoring platform, in 2017. When the pandemic stalled in-store tailoring, she pivoted the underlying fit-data infrastructure into Revive, which she has grown 46x in under a year and which has processed roughly $23M in merchandise. She is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Amanda Rees is the co-founder and CEO of Bold, a Los Angeles based digital fitness platform that delivers personalized, science-based exercise programs to help older adults build strength, ease pain, and prevent falls. A Princeton-trained chemical and biological engineer who is also a longtime dance and tai chi instructor, Rees built Bold after spending most of her twenties caring for her grandmother and discovering how few preventive tools existed for aging well. Bold partners with Medicare Advantage plans and has raised about $27 million in total funding, including a $17 million Series A.
Amelia Degenkolb is the CEO and co-founder of Novocuff, a Mountain View medical device company building the Cervical Control System, a device designed to stabilize the cervix, retain amniotic fluid and prolong pregnancies threatened by preterm premature rupture of membranes. A biomedical engineer who spent seven years as the first employee and lead engineer at Alydia Health, she helped bring the Jada System for postpartum hemorrhage to market before that company's $240M acquisition by Organon. In July 2024 she raised an oversubscribed $26M Series A to fund a U.S. pivotal trial aimed at reducing preterm births, the leading cause of infant mortality worldwide.
Amit Jhawar is the CEO of Attentive, the AI-powered SMS and mobile marketing platform. Before martech, he spent a decade building payments: he was among the first 30 employees at Braintree, served as its CFO and COO, engineered the acquisition of Venmo, and then ran Venmo as CEO after PayPal bought the business. A former Accel partner, he joined Attentive as President in 2021 and was promoted to CEO in June 2023, where he has steered the company from SMS marketing into a broader AI-driven customer engagement platform.
Anastasia Leng is the founder and CEO of CreativeX, a New York technology company that uses AI and computer vision to measure the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of the images and videos brands put into the world. Fortune 500 giants like Unilever, Heineken, Mondelez, Nestle, and Google use it to bring data to the one part of marketing that has always resisted measurement: the creative itself. A lifelong nomad raised across seven countries and a former Google product lead who co-founded the celebrated ecommerce startup Hatch, Leng has built CreativeX into one of the defining companies in the emerging field of creative data, raising about $30 million along the way.
Andrei Georgescu is the co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne, a biotech company that grows human tissues in the lab and runs drugs through them with robots and AI before any human ever swallows a pill. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering PhD who once sent lab-grown tissue to space with NASA, he started Vivodyne in 2020 because roughly 19 of every 20 drugs that work in animals fail in people. His pitch is blunt: test human medicine on human tissue, not on mice. In May 2025 Vivodyne raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to scale a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab in South San Francisco.
Andrés Ugarte is the founder and CEO of Copilot Money, a privacy-first personal finance app he started after quitting Google in 2018 because he couldn't find a money app he actually wanted to use. Built as a native Swift app with on-device machine learning, Copilot launched in January 2020 with seven users, reached profitability in 2023, and crossed 100,000+ paying subscribers. When Intuit shut down Mint in late 2023, Copilot's signups spiked 5x and the company grew more in four months than in its previous four years - momentum that fueled a $6M Series A led by Nico Wittenborn's Adjacent in March 2024.
Andrew Barnell is the co-founder and CEO of Geneoscopy, a St. Louis life sciences company that turned a sibling conversation about a missed colonoscopy into ColoSense, the first FDA-approved stool RNA test for colorectal cancer screening. A Cornell economics graduate and Wharton MBA who started in J.P. Morgan's healthcare investment banking group and private equity at Lindsay Goldberg, Barnell paired his finance background with the scientific work of his sister and co-founder Erica Barnell, MD/PhD, to build a company that has raised more than $217 million and earned FDA approval for a noninvasive screening test built on patented RNA biomarker technology.
Andrew Chadeayne is the founder and CEO of CaaMTech, an Issaquah, Washington psychedelic pharmaceutical company building safer, patentable psychedelic-inspired medicines. A chemist (PhD, Cornell) and patent attorney (JD, George Washington) who began his career proving sugar is addictive through opioid pathways, he has filed more than 100 patent applications mapping the chemistry of psilocybin, tryptamines and other psychedelics. His strategy is to expand 'the universe of available compounds' rather than bet on a single molecule, giving researchers a toolbox of characterized psychedelics for mental health treatment.
Andrew Collins is the CEO and co-founder of Bungalow, the largest co-living network in the United States. Raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma among serial entrepreneurs, he studied sociology and economics at Princeton and earned an MBA from Wharton before deliberately collecting skills at Medallia, Facebook, and the startup studio Atomic. In 2017 he and Justin McCarty turned their own struggle to find affordable housing and friends in a new city into Bungalow, which furnishes homes and rents individual bedrooms at roughly 30% below the cost of a studio. The company has raised about $175 million, including a $75 million Series C in 2021, from backers like Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and Coatue.
Andrew Curtis is the CEO of Clearco, the Toronto-based fintech that fronts cash to ecommerce brands without taking their equity. A two-decade Wall Street veteran of leveraged credit and restructurings - with stops at Merrill Lynch and Lazard Freres - he arrived as an advisor in 2022, took the top job in early 2023, and steered the once-troubled company through a recapitalization and a ground-up rebuild. Under him, Clearco has deployed billions across thousands of brands, tripled funding in 2024, and relaunched a platform he pitches as 'capital that thinks like a founder.'
Andrew Kress is the co-founder and CEO of HealthVerity, the Philadelphia company that built one of the largest real-world healthcare data ecosystems and the technology to link, govern and exchange it without exposing patient identities. An English major from Yale who spent his career inside the plumbing of healthcare data - running SDI Health, then leading Healthcare Value Solutions at IMS Health - he started HealthVerity in 2014 to make fragmented, privacy-bound health data usable. The company raised $100M in Series D funding in 2021 led by Durable Capital Partners. Kress also serves on the boards of Philadelphia cultural institutions including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Andrew Le is the co-founder and CEO of Buoy Health, an AI-driven health navigation platform he started out of Harvard Innovation Labs in 2014 after taking three years off from Harvard Medical School. A physician by training who once researched brain cancer, Le built Buoy to answer one deceptively simple question for people who reach for Google first: when do I actually need to see a doctor? Under his leadership Buoy has raised more than $66 million and reached millions of users, drawing backing from major insurers including Optum, Cigna and Humana.
Andrew Schiermeier is the President and CEO of AvenCell Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Dresden, Germany building switchable, universal CAR-T cell therapies for hard-to-treat cancers like acute myeloid leukemia. An engineer-turned-operator with a Harvard PhD in applied mathematics, he spent two decades across startups and global pharma - five years at CRISPR pioneer Intellia Therapeutics rising to COO, and a stint running Merck KGaA's oncology business across 60-plus countries - before taking AvenCell's helm in 2021 and leading its $112 million Series B in 2024.
Andy Kidd is the chief executive officer of Tentarix Biotherapeutics, a San Diego company building conditionally active multispecific biologics for oncology and autoimmune disease through its Tentacles platform. A physician turned operator, he carries an unusual pairing of credentials - an M.D. from Oxford and a CFA - and spent over two decades crossing from the consulting room into the boardroom, from Boston Consulting Group to Baxter International to the helm of Nasdaq-listed Aptinyx, which he took public. He stepped into the Tentarix CEO seat in April 2024 to scale a science-heavy startup backed by partnerships with Gilead and AbbVie.
Andy Thompson is the cofounder and CEO of Safehub, a San Francisco company that puts low-cost sensors on buildings to deliver real-time, building-specific earthquake damage data. A structural and earthquake engineer trained at UC Berkeley, he spent 16 years at the global engineering firm Arup, where he built its Catastrophe Risk & Insurance practice and worked post-disaster in countries from Chile to Haiti to Japan. He cofounded Safehub in 2015 with catastrophe-risk veteran Doug Frazier, raised a $9M Series A in 2021, and has deployed sensors across thousands of buildings in dozens of countries, now powering sensor-triggered parametric earthquake insurance with partners like Liberty Mutual Reinsurance.